Bobbing For Credentials: What An Suspicious Email Could Mean

Let’s play a little situation out here today. So you’re getting ready for the day and you decide to check your email. Then you see something that catches your eye. “IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR UW STUDENTS!!!” It reads, so you open it because it’s in bold and begging for your attention. It reads something along the lines of your account has a problem with it and you need to sign in to fix the error. There’s a link highlighted in blue, you click on it and it brings you to a sign in page that looks 100% identical to any old UWYO sign in page. But you notice that the URL in the search bar doesn’t look right at all. There’s no .edu in it at all. It looks like a garbled mess of characters and symbols. But you figure this is a special occasion right? So you enter your credentials just like normal but to your surprise, you get a 404 error or something similar to it.

You’ve become a victim of what is called a Phishing email. That basically means that your account credentials have been stolen. Luckily for you, our UWIT Security Team has put some safe guards in place to know when someone is logging in that isn’t you. But that doesn’t guarantee the safety of your account. So if this happens to you and even if you’re not sure if you gave your credentials out or not, Call the Help Desk anyways at 307-766-4357 option 1 and we can help you protect your account and make sure it’s safe!